


The One Where Clary Wants a Blood Test

by SimplexityJane



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Incest-Be-Gone, Jace Four-Last-Names, Jace Wayland is a Herondale, Nature Versus Nurture, Seriously you idiots this could all be cleared up with a blood test
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 08:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9648329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: There are an infinite number of universes. In one, Clary Fray remembers she was raised mundane, and mundanes have been using DNA testing for years.





	

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate summary to this: the one where the author gets fed up with the show dragging its feet wrt the Wayland-Lightwood-Morgenstern-Herondale storyline. I mean, it's a really, really bad idea to believe a manipulative abuser without question, and they just... didn't question him at all. 
> 
> I have not and will never read the books, so everything is from the show except for the knowledge that Jace is the victim of kidnapping and gaslighting and is not in fact a Morgenstern. Since we're getting Sebastian, aka the real JC Morgenstern (according to the wiki), in the show, I'm preeeetty sure they're going to confirm this, possibly before the season two finale.

After getting back to the Institute and handing the Mortal Cup over to the Inquisitor, who stared at Jace a little too long for him to be comfortable, he decided he was going to go be alone for a while. It wasn’t wallowing, he told himself. It was brooding, probably, which was somehow better. He was Valentine’s _son_. If anyone deserved some time to brood, it was him.

Imagine his surprise, then, when Clary _dragged_ him off of his path to his bedroom, which was prime brooding ground. He stared at her, at that fiery hair and equally fiery eyes (and was he supposed to have known? How could he have, when he had his weird one-blue-one-brown eyes and Clary’s were green, and she was redheaded, and he was blonde? How?). Her expression was set in a frown, and he wondered if anything he said to her right now would even get through. His… oh, Raziel have mercy, his _sister_ was stubborn.

If they hadn’t kissed, if he hadn’t wanted more, it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d been adopted, and _Alec, Max_ , and _Izzy_ were his siblings. They were the ones that mattered. The only reason it even mattered that they were related was because he wanted her in the worst way. It made his gut clench into knots, and he couldn’t have said anything if he wanted to.

They ended up at Izzy’s lab, which was empty except for the woman herself. She was wearing her lab coat, and it was almost normal except that he remembered that she was going around dressed like this _all the time_ now. Before everything about the Circle and their parents came out, the only time she tied her hair back was in the lab, keeping it away from ‘delicate mundane and downworlder remains’. He wished they could go back there, to when everything was simple.

“Clary tells me you need a blood test,” Izzy said, and… what? He blinked at her, opening his mouth to ask what this was about. “Since your blood type is B positive, and Clary’s is O positive, we can’t rule out the possibility of you being siblings through that. Sorry, bro. It’ll take about a week before you get answers.”

“Wait, what?” Jace asked. Izzy laughed. It wasn’t exactly a nice laugh, though.

“Jace, my parents lost their son,” Clary murmured. “It… it can happen, in the mundane world, at least. I... I’m not making sense, but. Okay. So, imagine you have a kid, and that kid dies. Some people can, well, not be _okay_ , obviously, after that you’re _never_ gonna be okay again, but they deal with it. And some people are like Valentine even without experimenting with creepy blood magic or whatever—”

“And we don’t know if the blood had mind-altering effects, but we can guess that it _did_ ,” Izzy interjected. Clary nodded and let go of Jace’s hand to point at her. She turned back to him and smiled, and she was beautiful, and that was wrong, wrong, _wrong_ of him to think, but…

“So Valentine might actually think you’re his biological son, or he might be using you for some other reason, but we have to know, Jace.”

Jace didn’t understand everything they were saying. Valentine had raised him, had said that he was his father for ten years and was saying he was _now_ , and it made sense. You didn’t raise someone who wasn’t your own kid, you just… you didn’t do that.

But… that was wrong, somehow. The Lightwoods had taken him in, had been his _family_ , and they weren’t his blood. Plenty of Shadowhunters had done that after the Uprising, adopted orphaned kids. He wasn’t the only one.

“You’re saying Valentine might not be my father. That he might just be delusional, or a liar.”

A weight fell off of his chest when he said it out loud. It actually _made sense_ that Valentine would do that. He could lie to anyone, even his own children (and it hurt, that Valentine might not be his father but that no matter what happened, he was still his _son_ ). There was something very wrong with him that made it _easy_.

(It felt like a betrayal, but Jace knew that Clary could do something similar. She was charismatic and strong and determined to get her way, no matter the consequences. She was like Valentine, but, his mind insisted, only in the best ways, if that was possible. He never would have helped Meliorn, and from what Clary told him of Luke’s story, he would have staked Simon in a heartbeat. Jace might not necessarily agree with letting him be turned, but now at least Simon had a choice in how to proceed. That mattered.)

“Yes. We just need a sample of yours and Clary’s blood to compare. We’ll run it through the database, too, even though neither Valentine nor Jocelyn are there. There’s a chance he kidnapped you, and you should know your family if it’s still out there.”

Izzy said it the way she always said things like that, calm and professional like she never was with them. He frowned.

“You’re my family, Iz. Even if… even if Valentine _is_ my biological father, you’re my sister, and Alec and Max are my brothers, and Robert and Maryse are my parents. He lied to me for ten years. He doesn’t get to say he’s my father no matter what happens.”

That made both Izzy and Clary smile, and it was quick after that, just a pinprick of pain in the crook of his arm and the weird feeling of something underneath his skin. Clary’s nose wrinkled when Izzy took her blood, and he let himself think that that was cute, because maybe it was okay for him to do that. Maybe he wasn’t wrong to want this.

Maybe it would all be okay.

* * *

Imogen Herondale took a deep breath, touched the rune on her right hand, and dialed a phone number given to her for only the strictest emergencies.

Seeing her dead son’s eyes in a twenty-something’s face counted as an emergency.

She had known about Marcus’s demonic heritage when they met, of course. It was diluted – he would never have his grandfather’s abilities, for which everyone was grateful – but no Herondale could hide his eyes, and Marcus was no exception. One blue, always, and one of another color. She had met the Blackthorn children, and they too had the mark.

His had been a striking gold. Stephen had inherited her own brown, a sign that the demon blood was finally finding its way out of the bloodline, if incredibly slowly. She had wondered what her grandchildren’s eyes would look like, if perhaps one of them wouldn’t have the mark at all. When Stephen had died, and then Celine had supposedly killed herself and her child out of grief, she had thought she would never know.

Now she did.

The line rang twice before it was picked up.

“Imogen?” Tessa Gray asked. Her accent lilted, and her voice sounded young, almost as young as Jace Wayland’s. Imogen couldn’t reply for a moment, and the voice continued on, “What’s the matter, my dear girl?”

Her diction wasn’t young. She sounded like a grandmother, and she was. Technically she was Imogen’s _great_ grandmother through marriage, even. She took a deep breath. She was too old for these dramatics.

“I… have very strong reason to suspect that Celine and Stephen’s son is alive, and I would like to formally invite you to the New York Institute to investigate this.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. A beat passed, and then Tessa sighed heavily.

“Because the Clave cannot officially investigate, as they declared Celine Herondale a coward and a murderess. As we’re going to war again, there can be no dissent.”

The words were cold, but they were true. With the new war coming with Valentine, learning that the Clave had made a mistake about a young girl’s apparent suicide would be disastrous.

Imogen’s hands still shook.

“He has the Herondale eyes,” was all she could say in reply. _Your eyes_ , she didn’t continue.

“And I imagine he’ll have the Herondale birthmark too. When I confirm this, you _know_ it’s going to get out. The Clave are a bigger bunch of gossips than any old women I’ve ever met.” She paused. “And he’ll want to know his family, even if you _didn’t_ want to know him.”

This time the silence stretched on for far longer, the weight of unsaid words between them. Tessa had seen both she and Marcus fall apart after Stephen’s death, and even more when Celine followed him. They may have disowned him for following Valentine Morgenstern to an early grave, but he was still their son, and the baby was still their grandson. Losing that last piece of hope, of their son, had killed Marcus and nearly done the same to her.

“I know,” Imogen said. It was all she could say to this woman who was her family and yet not family at all. “There… could be other difficulties that you should be aware of.”

Returning to formality was all she could do while her world fell apart. Tessa made a noise over the line, and Imogen detailed the situation in New York as concisely as possible, including the horrifying truth that Valentine Morgenstern had kidnapped and raised her grandson.

“Well. Fuck.”

Imogen couldn’t help but agree.

* * *

In the end, it didn’t change much. Meeting Tessa Gray, knowing that the Inquisitor was apparently his grandmother, didn’t do a good job helping Jace come to terms with the fact that Valentine had _raised him_. Had done… something to him, that made Tessa stare and whisper about Ithuriel, who was the angel that had made it possible for her to be born alive. Jace wasn’t sure why that angel mattered, actually, but apparently he did.

Valentine called him ‘son’. Jace didn’t correct him. In all the ways that mattered he _was_ the man’s son. If it came down to blood versus teachings, sometimes blood won out, Jace knew just from watching Clary, but sometimes it _didn’t_. He’d met Luke and seen the similarities between him and Clary, little expressions that were the same on such different faces. He knew _he_ had the same habits as Maryse and Robert, even.

He’d inherited something from Valentine, even if he didn’t know what it was. Darkness, or rage, or the sick need to hurt the world for hurting him, maybe.

He was just glad that that _wasn’t_ why he went with him. In the end, Jace went with Valentine to protect his friends, to protect _his_ _family_. In that moment, that was all that mattered.


End file.
